#Banks & #Mortgage Market have not adequately priced-in #ClimateChange

“Financial Markets today have not adequately priced-in the likely near-term policy response to climate change”



A UN-supported entity called Principles for Responsible Investment, PRI — whose membership includes some 500 global asset managers — predicts a market “response by 2025 that will be forceful, abrupt and disorderly because of the delay”. In plain English, they expect a market shock.



A McKinsey consultant gave the UN a couple of examples of where “disorderly” repricing might occur. Coastal regions such as Florida, he warned, could deliver asset price shocks for lenders, insurers and homeowners. So, too, in places such as Spain, southern France, Greece and Italy which are projected to see eye-popping increases in drought. 

...



Using a synthetic portfolio of 100,000 residential mortgages in southern Florida — based on the exposure of a real bank — Jupiter, a climate advisory group, forecasts a tripling of losses from flood damage in the next couple of decades.

...

American households typically use 30-year mortgages to buy properties, [but] the price of insurance is reset annually. There is, in other words, an embedded maturity mismatch in risks in the Florida property markets that could spark mortgage defaults, hurting borrowers and lenders.





See the full article on the FT here:  Climate change could cause a new mortgage default crisis

#PropTech #Startup #Cadre Flipping #RealEstate Like A Pro Hits $100M in Investor Returns

Cadre was most recently valued at $800 Million. 

In the five years since launching in 2014, the startup now has roughly 20,000 investors who have stakes in more than $3 billion worth of real estate assets.

With the recent sale of two apartment complexes in the Chicago and Atlanta metro areas, respectively, Cadre says it's hit a new milestone—$100 million in returns to its investors, to date.

VC Backers includes Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. The company is among a wave of "proptech" companies that have sought to disrupt the commercial real estate industry via tech-enabled platforms and products.

Read the article on Fortune here: https://fortune.com/2019/09/26/proptech-startup-cadre-investor-returns/

#Politics and #Advocacy Are Tainting #Science #LongReads

This is a great research report showing how Politics and Advocacy are tainting Science and Academia.  A sad story. 

"advocacy is not scholarship; the former is specifically concerned with advancing human rights, the latter with the production of knowledge. To insist that scholars of a particular discipline adhere to and even advance preordained social politics looks to me frighteningly like the situation Galileo found himself in."

Darkness's Descent on the American Anthropological Association

A Cautionary Tale

Author: Alice Dreger

Human Nature September 2011, Volume 22, Issue 3, pp 225–246

Open AccessArticle

SpringerLink

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-011-9103-y

Abstract

"In September 2000, the self-styled "anthropological journalist" Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney's claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney's claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA's problematic actions in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney's falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author [Alice Dreger] intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles."

…

"if the life's work of your colleague is on the line, can you not take some extra time to produce a report you feel comfortable showing to the membership of your supposedly democratic scholarly organization? Apparently not if you think your job is utilitarian public relations damage control."

…

"justice that is meted out according to politics and not according to facts is the justice of the Middle Ages. If justice is not based on the facts, if principles of justice are not applied universally, there is no real justice. Forms of "scholarship" that deny evidence, that deny truth, that deny the importance of facts—even if performed in the name of good—are dangerous not only to science and to ethics, but to democracy. And so they are dangerous ultimately to humankind."

Read the full research report here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-011-9103-y